Yeah it's probably an ancient web site. This was commonplace back in the day when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. Lazy web devs couldn't be bothered to support other browsers (or didn't know how) so just added a message demanding you use IE as opposed to fixing the problems with the site.
I think the sentiment was to keep your content (and audience) portable, not specifically that you don't rely on anyone else's services. If you post everything on Twitter and Twitter decides they don't like you, then that's the end of you. If you host on a personal domain and your rented web host decides to block you, there's plenty more options and you can take your audience with you and they will never know the difference.
I know it was, but the click-baity headline makes it seem like you're becoming independent of the whims of private companies, which you are very much not if you're renting a host somewhere. You're definitely not a property owner, you might be a domain owner (renter still, I don't know of any domains which you can pay for and keep forever).
As long as the services you're renting are commoditizated, you are independent of their whims.
You can easily replace a VPS provider with a different provider that will give you exactly the same service. You can't replace Facebook with a different Facebook.
My guess is the average technical book is probably in the hundreds of copies over a reasonable lifetime. Mine's sold 91 copies in 5 months. It's a book about how machine learning works. Unknown author, I have no social media and zero advertising budget. It's just Amazon organic listings. The economics are definitely not good but I didn't write it for money. I wrote it mainly for more existential reasons that I wanted to put my words out there and leave something behind in the world.
I'd agree with the article authors figures. I have a small family home in the UK and use about 2000 KWh a year electric only. I have gas heating and water.
Electricity cost is currently running at about 28p/KWh. I presume that's a lot more than the US. Electric heating is indeed rarer because gas is about 1/3 of the cost.
I'm thinking your points about air conditioning is likely the major difference combined with the average US home being larger so more space to air-con. Few UK homes have air conditioners (offices do) as it doesn't usually get hot enough. Although this has started to change in the last few years and I'm seeing them occasionally popping up now on neighbours houses. I wouldn't have needed one this year at all so far. Last year, maybe for one week. I was thinking about it but by the time you've looked into organising something the heat has gone and you forget about it until next year. There is a push to move to heat pump heating instead of gas and those units often can do air-con as a byproduct so that may be a driver for change.
Tumble driers are easily available and definitely widespread in the UK. The lack of tumbler driers is a bizarre myth I see again and again on lists of differences between the US and UK. I have no idea how the authors of these lists come to this conclusion. The only idea I have is maybe people from the US who come to the UK rent a furnished house and the landlord cheaps out and decides not to supply one. I do have one and it runs to about 2KWh a load maybe? I don't think that would explain the difference in any case.
Pretty sure it's A/B testing. I'm logged in with uBlock Origin and no anti-adblock is visible. I've seen someone on Reddit complaining they were getting this and loads of people replied to say they were not. They're probably trying to figure out how many users/views they will lose or how many new premium subscribers they get or something like that.
My team rely on a/b testing. It’s the only way we can test whether the tweaks in our ML model produce positive results or not.
Playing devils advocate here I think it’s actually a good idea that YT are testing this. They need to understand how big of a negative impact this would be if released. If enough users hate this change as you and I suspect then hopefully YT see these results in their tests and revisit their approach.
A/b testing stops the worst user experiences from getting rolled out. Our company did a high profile a/b test that got a lot of negative feedback from users and the whole redesign it got canned because of it.
I'd prefer Google to impose those changes on 100% of it users so it could generate outrage and incentivize people to jump ship, instead of enabling them to push it slowly and cooking everyone without them noticing.
There's a book "The People's Republic of Walmart" that makes these arguments. Walmart is a massive company, as large as some entire countries even, that operates an internal economy based on central planning. They tell all their suppliers exactly what will be produced, in what quantities, when it will be delivered and largely what it will cost. Modern stock control systems and supplier integration make it feasible.
Calling walmart centrally planned is a massive mistake. Walmart is only responding to what its customers want. That is not central planning as it has ever been used to describe an economy. Central planners repeatedly tried to dictate what consumers want. Walmart is quite literally a market, the opposite of centrally planned.
Responding to purchasing decision by downstream consumers is what the USSR tried to. In theory you would buy things, the price would be slightly higher than the cost, and whatever was being bought more would be produced more, with the profit reinvested in trying to make new products and services. In practice organizing the production efficiently was too difficult due to a confluence of a dozen factors.
Point being, responding to consumer demand is indeed what central planning is supposed to do.
And in practice, every level that has a say in the central planning - even at Walmart - tries to impose other agendas. What they would like to see more produced and consumed as opposed to what the would be purchaser wants. In Russia it might have been that someone wanted to drain off some money, while they knew some regional admin who wanted their figures to look good, etc up the chain. Result: garbage tractors and not enough of them. In the US, with central planning, gas engines are penalized or electrical ones are pushed - whether you think this is a good reason or not.
At least in the US, if Walmart central planning insists on procuring crappy paper towels, there is a good chance that their competitor Target, literally across the street, is at least ignoring them and perhaps even deliberately exploiting their mistake.
Free economy doesn't mean that a business shouldn't try and plan the hell out of things. It means that each business planning process is not the only one around, and all these business are free to have various obsessions (ethical, religious, racist or whatever - none of them traps everyone in), and all these are free to have other blind spots and bugs, etc. They do have bugs. They look for each other's bugs and respond to them.
There were huge numbers of Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones too in the 80s from all kinds of manufacturers. Pirate Spectrums were widely popular in the Soviet Union:
